all-wireless

The forthcoming (imminent even – with caveats, see “So What” below) wireless spec 802.11ax is a genuinely worthy next generation wireless standard. It has a bunch of substantial improvements over 802.11ac which can be summed up in IEEE’s initial 802.11ax goal to reach for 4x improvement designing for high density scenarios. You’ll run into “4x” a lot in vendor’s marketing. IEEE started it! Talking 4x up back in circa 2014.

I’m pretty keen on how 802.11ax appropriates 4G LTE’s OFDMA and resource scheduling. 802.1ax has jettisoned previous wireless standards’s (802.11ac and prior) method of determining when it’s your turn to transmit, while keeping 802.11ac/n backwards compatibility. This is not a technical blog on Wi-Fi – suffice to say 802.11 standards prior to 802.11ax – very broadly speaking – rely on collision avoidance, waiting (yes waiting), and permission to transmit (request to send) to finally get around to communicating over wireless in the gaps when other clients are quiet. This is a client competition for airtime to send to the AP.

Resource scheduling refers to scheduling client airtime access. Clearly a proven approach for LTE, bring it on for 802.11ax. As well as the other 802.11ax improvements – 802.11ax brings the previously mentioned 4x better throughput in higher density environments; new modulation and coding set 1024-QAM; OFDMA with its attendant benefits; power management improvements for longer client battery life, and up to 8×8 MU-MIMO in both downlink and uplink to support up to 8 users simultaneously. At least they are some of the highlights. Go find a really great technical explanation for more.

So What.

Yep. For the moment (measured in say – years) So what. Why?

To get the 4x increase in throughput in high-density wireless environments. Assuming pure 802.11ax AP infrastructure:

With the Wi-Fi Calling standard, all Telco’s are already off-loading voice calls from their carrier grade mobile networks to your Wi-Fi network.

That’s right – the in-building business Wi-Fi that you’ve deployed is now automatically a Telco’s extension and further distribution of in-building mobile coverage for mobile voice calls.

Google your Telco and “Wi-Fi Calling” and check out all those search results for friendly easy to follow FAQs to encourage your adoption.

Wi-Fi Calling is here now. The quality of your property’s Wi-Fi enables the critical initial hops – from user’s mobile call over wireless to access point, then across your network, and out across your internet connection.

Supported natively in recent generations of Apple and Android smartphones. Whether by behaviour (smartphone user preferring Wi-Fi to mobile data), or by necessity (low mobile signal strength), Wi-Fi Calling over your WLAN is now also the primary access method for voice.

We know the world is wireless-first for data. Voice – welcome on-board the WLAN.

“Over The Top” (OTT) voice services like Skype are old news. What’s new and different with Wi-Fi Calling is the native smartphone dialer with iOS and Android operating system support.

A defining advancement with native Mobile Network Operator adoption and network support – is the user won’t know or care if the mobile phone uses the mobile network (as in days of yore), or your Wi-Fi network – to make the call.

You’re Welcome, Telco

To be fair to Telcos – with their instant extended in-building coverage, courtesy of everyone but them – everybody wins. By investing in Wi-Fi Calling ready WLANs – property owners and managers may elect to avoid installing DAS, with duplicated base station infrastructure for each mobile network operator (MNO). Or Small Cells installations for each MNO.

Australia is not a particularly neutral-host enlightened MNO environment, so Wi-Fi Calling becomes even more attractive, given it’s neutral-host characteristics by default. Quite a feat to get around the eminently sensible multi-operator Mexican stand-off (nope, no Carlos Slim references here). Each smartphone auto-establishes their own IPSec tunnel over Wi-Fi Calling to their Wi-Fi Calling enabled MNO. Congratulations, your Wi-Fi network is neutral-host, multi-operator ready.

This makes Wi-Fi Calling a much less expensive solution to the property owner. Of course some of those savings will go towards addressing the rigorous demands of voice over Wi-Fi.

Your office WLAN system will need to ramp up what you consider your baselines are for received signal strength and signal to noise. Your wireless and wired networks now require the ability to prioritize Wi-Fi Calling voice traffic end to end.

Wi-Fi planning and design for voice is non-trivial, and now non-optional.

The best time to make the move to an all-wireless office is when your business is going through change. Your business may be renovating, expanding, or moving. You may be experiencing growth, upheaval, transformation.

Any kind of organizational change is the right time to seriously consider the capital savings, security, speed, and robustness of a 802.11ac based enterprise-grade wireless Wi-FI solution for your primary network access.

We’ll always emphasise how we position what constitutes a wireless-only office. Reality dictates of course it’s never wireless-only. Ethernet cable runs are always necessary for supporting the wireless infrastructure.

There are always going to be use-cases and scenarios where running network cables is sometimes routinely unavoidable, and sometimes just wise. There are too many applications in too many departments in too many industry verticals to make all or nothing statements about 100% wireless environments.

So an all-wireless office is really an all-wireless experience, and not a way to pedantically describe the ratio of wireless to wired network connections. This will be different for every organisation and department.

Look at a Wi-Fi only office as a mobile-first enabled digital workplace for your already mobile-first talent.

The clear business benefits, in concert with the rapid advances in 802.11 wireless technology are aligning today with your mobile-first talent. Wi-Fi can be what it’s now expected to be – the default network access medium.

Wi-Fi is everywhere else

Wi-Fi is everywhere else. The enterprise is the last hold-out to pervasive wireless. There is a perfectly understandable reticence with a view in the rear-vision mirror to security and control, performance, and reliability.

Now everyone is mobile-first, the expectation is always-on anytime anywhere ubiquitous wireless access.

Today, asking talent to make their career play out each day for a fixed amount of time at a fixed location is taking a gamble on their loyalty and tenure. The ability to work from any location at any time – inside or outside the office is an important enabler of staff engagement, and based on an all-wireless digital office.

The good ship Wi-Fi has already sailed. We are too far down the wireless-only path to ever turn back and re-shackle ourselves to ethernet cables. We don’t have to turn to analysis to intuitively understand why our present network access is already predominantly wireless (the workplace is catching up), and our future will be an all-wireless user experience.

With 802.11ac wave 2 speeds, you can now seriously consider deploying a wireless-centric network. It took ethernet over twenty years to become the primary network access method, Wi-Fi is achieving network access primacy in a decade. Wireless network access expectations have become comparable with wired networks. Users assume the same performance and reliability they’ve always had with ethernet cabled connectivity.

About now those with a background in Wi-Fi design and 802.11/wireless engineering principles are waiting for some kind of validation. This is hard. There are many more variables that go into an optimal network design in the wireless world.

Making wireless the primary network requires great care in making the right design and planning decisions. I’ll come out and say it – let me disabuse you of any notions of throwing APs around your workplace, running through a setup wizard then throwing your network cables away.

We all dream of a future where wireless vendors release APs that apply artificial intelligence to dynamically learning and adjusting for radio frequency interference and noise sources. This intelligence exists in nascent form in enterprise grade APs available today.

AI is lovely sure, and it all helps, but back to reality. Using open air (an unbounded medium) as we do for wireless connectivity is complex. Then using this unbounded medium with expectations of an ethernet cabled (bounded medium) equivalent experience is quite the big call. Yet for a wireless-first network – that’s exactly what we are proposing and designing for.

The all Wi-Fi office. As in Wi-Fi only. Yes, Wi-Fi as the primary network.

We’ll get to the assumptions through all the conversations in this blog. Yes, planning for Wi-Fi as the primary network access is loaded with a myriad of important WLAN design considerations. Yes, of course its not zero cables. Over and above the supporting role of wired infrastructure to connect to each AP back to ethernet switches, there are potentially all manner of devices today without Wi-Fi chipsets built-in. Multi-function units, esoteric machines in certain industry verticals, and so on. If the device is stationary and has no Wi-Fi support, plug it in. For now.

Wireless connectivity is inexorably moving into dominance as the primary network access. All the data sees this, and empirically, anecdotally, anyway you care to call it – the velocity of wireless to supplant wired networks is accelerating.

Not hard up front to see some very good reasons why. Freedom. The flexibility to work anywhere with anyone, anytime. Flexibility is not a major selling point of the traditional cabled ethernet LAN. Going to need a high-performance reliable wireless network to create the environment to attract talent, optimise productivity and efficiency, all the while meeting staff expectations they can pull out any number of fun, stylish BYOD devices and get serious work done. Millennials anyone?

A confluence of trends and behaviours are working together to arrive at the all-wireless workplace. For Millennials its visceral – they’ve already stopped reading this – have already said thanks for the trip to Obviousville I’m out of here, besides I haven’t checked my device for 15 seconds and this twitchy panicky feeling can’t be soothed any other way. An engaged Millennial is strongly correlated with an untethered flexible rich wireless user experience.

Mobile-first is often cited to describe what it means to work in a next generation workplace. The platform for mobile-first is a robust pervasive high-performance WLAN.

Phil Flaxton (chief executive of Work Wise UK) says “… work is an activity we do rather than a place we go to”. My take on a wireless-only workplace is “… work is an activity we do rather than a desk we go to”.